In October, reports of women being spiked via injection in nightclubs and bars began to emerge. As they did, posts on Facebook and Twitter started wrongly claiming that victims had tested positive for HIV shortly after being spiked with a needle.
Some messages from official accounts, such as West Yorkshire Police, also warned that being injected with an unsterilised needle could expose someone to HIV.
It is technically possible to contract HIV through a used needle, but the National AIDS Trust has said that cases are “extremely rare”. The organisation also described the posts about reported spiking victims testing positive for the virus days after being spiked as “demonstrably false”, owing to the fact that it takes four to six weeks for HIV to reliably be detected on testing.
Deborah Gold, the chief executive of the National AIDS Trust, told Reuters: “In the UK it is recommended that people wait six weeks after possible exposure to test for HIV. This ensures that those testing can be confident that any negative test is accurate.”
Ms Gold said anyone who thinks they have been exposed to HIV in the past 72 hours should go to A&E or a sexual health clinic, where a treatment called post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) can be given to stop an HIV infection after the virus has entered the body.
She added: “There have been no confirmed cases of HIV infections from needle stick injuries in the UK since 1999, and whilst it is possible to acquire HIV by sharing unsterilised injecting equipment, in the UK the number of examples of this each year is very low.”
When someone who has potentially been exposed to HIV presents to a medical professional, they would usually be given a blood test to establish whether or not the patient already had HIV. They would then be tested again following a window period, after which HIV antibodies would appear, therefore making the infection detectable.
This fact check is based on an extract from a wider article we recently published about reports of spiking with needles. For more information including police updates, perspectives from experts and statistics on spiking incidents, click here.